(Aside: I was not expecting to enter my expansion key and receive 30 days of game time - WoW most certainly does not include time in their expansion boxes, and I'd heard that the same was true for most games' expansions.)

Overall, it's been a positive experience. I feel obliged to offer that disclaimer, because this post may come off a bit nit-picky and negative. This is a minor drawback to the game's frequent retrials - I've had plenty of opportunities to come back and notice the major improvements to the game, so those are all old news. Now that I'm actually spending some time in game, I'm free to notice minor and not-so-minor places where the game has NOT improved while I've gone.

The Rigors of TravelSomewhere on the other side of this ditch, the slope becomes shallow enough to climb. As far as I can tell, the only way to figure out is to run into the wall until you find a spot where you can make upwards progress.

Travel so far has not been too painful. I have a one-hour hearthstone equivalent that I can place at a location where I am questing, and a second one-hour racial swift travel spell to return to the town of Bree. Sadly, my horse will not go into Moria, so I'm going to be mountless for probably the majority of the expansion (there's a rep grind involved in claiming a Moria-capable goat mount).

The game's auto-mount travel system is slow but offers players the opportunity to hop off the ride mid way, using it as a shortcut to get places without fighting the local wildlife en route. I'm still a bit disappointed to find a network of invincible goat taxis in Moria, but I guess I wouldn't like the place very much if there weren't any.

One major feature, which I noted during a retrial, is that one of the outdoor zones in the expansion allows players to unlock nigh-instant "swift travel" routes to old quest hubs through completing the local quest deeds. In practice, this system has worked out very well. I end up unlocking the swift travel routes just as I finish each hub, so it isn't a huge waste of time if I discover that I missed a quest and have to backtrack.

Inventory and Crafting

LOTRO starts new players off with a total of five 15-slot bags, which seems outright generous compared to other games. Then you loot a warg and collect five separate items. The hide is for crafting and the claw is a tradeable item used for a class quest. The paws, the tooth, and the ear are vendor trash, each of which stacks to 10 items. If you're killing a lot of Worgs, you'll end up with a lot of stacks of items. Thankfully, the default UI displays the vendor value of everything you are carrying, so that you can tell what to trash WHEN your inventory gets full. It's often worth pitching a weapon worth 5 silver to make room for a paw worth 2 silver, because you're going to end up with a stack of 10 paws, and you can't stack the weapons.

I wrote about the new crafting guilds during a retrial. LOTRO uses an irritating "critical success" crafting system, where you have to pump out dozens or even hundreds of non-crit items that no one wants to get the ability to have a CHANCE of creating a crit success item that someone might actually pay you for. The crafting guild tackles this in two ways - players can create items that are worth rep instead of vendor trash, or players can use these tokens (the recipes have a cooldown) to guarantee a critical success on certain recipes. This was a huge improvement.

Item Advancement

The article I linked back in November points to the defunct Massive Gamer site - suffice it to say that Sanya Weathers warned me to go and complete the quest line to unlock the use of legendary weapons FIRST and then complete the remainder of the content outside Moria. If you do not do this, you can expect to have to grind out 20K weapon experience, at about 70 item exp per kill after having completed all of the local quests.

Fortunately, I was warned, and had plenty of quests to do outside the mines while I worked on leveling up my new weapon. I can see tremendous potential in this system, which allows you to customize your weapon over time. The only problem is that most of the possible attributes are not very good.

My weapon's bonuses include "rend bleed damage" (I don't even have a skill called "rend", nor anything that specifies that it causes bleeding damage, maybe this is the passive damage proc that spears cause?), damage with a horn attack whose primary purpose is an AOE stun, and two defensive abilities (one active, one stance) that I don't use because they gut my DPS, and every second that I extend combat is another second in which an additional mob, respawn, or patrol may come to kill me. When I "reforged" the weapon at level 10, I was given the choice of one of two new bonuses, both of which were similarily situational. There are a handful of highly powerful and useful abilities, they're just buried on a random table along with a dozen not so useful ones. The end result is that the only good use for my points is to enhance the weapon's base DPS - which is still lower than the crafted weapon I had been using before the expansion.

The thing is that none of this is accidental. Turbine is counting on the miniscule odds of actually obtaining a perfect weapon to provide a continual time sink of replacing your current weapon with a slightly better one. You know, this reminds me of the time that Gandalf vendored Glamdring after getting some random mob drop, and how Aragorn broke down Anduril for parts after beating a raid encounter.... oh wait, no, that's exactly what did NOT happen with the named legendary items that this system explicitly refers to.

No escaping the deed grind

One thing that I hadn't noticed was that my quest log is now 3 slots larger than it used to be. Apparently, you get an additional slot for every 10 deeds you complete. I am very disappointed that Turbine decided to put this sort of a bonus there.

Players will complete the deeds for quests and exploration relatively easily in the course of normal play, but many of LOTRO's deeds are no more interesting than "go kill 300 orcs". Killing 300 orcs is fine when the only reward for doing so is cosmetic, or when the orcs are one of several alternatives for obtaining the reward. The thing is that LOTRO's deeds are tied to "virtues", stat bonuses which stack with gear and cannot be obtained by any other means. For reference, I get significantly more stats out of the traits I have slotted than the "relics" that are socketed in my legendary weapon, or from any two pieces of gear, and none of my virtues are actually capped. Going without virtures is like going without pants - you can do it, but there's no reason why you would want to.

Virtues are currently capped at 10 ranks, even though there are more than 10 deeds that award most of them, so players do not need to complete every single kill deed in the game. They do, however, need to pick at least some of the kill deeds, or forever accept lower stats than players who did not. Once you're done killing 300 goblins in the zone of your choice, it's time to kill 300 animals in a different zone for a different virtue. You can only equip 5 virtues, so you used to be done once you're done with those fifty deeds (some of which were easy quests etc). Now, instead, they're pushing you to keep on going if you want to expand your quest log.

Isn't this "optional"? Sure, in the way that everything in an MMORPG is optional unless you've been kidnapped by power levelers who will shoot you if you don't level their characters for them. That does not mean that the trait grind is a good idea. Being sent around the countryside to slaughter thousands of NPC's with maybe a sentence of explanation of why they need to die is probably the least interesting aspect of the game. Having done so once has frankly taken a huge bite out of my interest in trying other characters, who would have to start the pointless kill grinding all over again from scratch. On top of all that, the system devalues the game's otherwise deep cosmetic title system, as players who want the stat bonuses have to FIRST earn the cosmetic titles.

In short, Turbine should have worked to REDUCE the emphasis on this system. Instead, they realized with shock and horror that some players might be finishing just the traits they needed and then skipping the rest of them, and they had to rush off to find some other incentive to rescue the rest of their timesink. I am not impressed.

What I expected and what I did notOverall, I did not expect to be thrilled with the state of Turbine's endgame timesinks - I've gotten pretty tired of WoW's versions of the same, and Blizzard's are far more involved than telling players to grind 300 orcs. Traits and reputations weren't enough to keep me interested in the game the first time around, and it doesn't look like continuously replacing "legendary" items will change that part of the game substantially.

One thing I did NOT expect to find was significant challenge in the solo game. I had initially concluded that my Champion had been nerfed, but I've since heard that they actually made a conscious decision to buff mob damage across the board for the expansion. The result has been precisely the sort of solo challenge that I've been missing of late - WoW's solo content is trivial, while EQ2 content tends to jump straight from easily soloable to needing a few group members very quickly.

So far, Moria has been a stretch of pushing the envelope to see what exactly I can accomplish. Even if Turbine's "endgame" does not deliver, and the deed system discourages me from making alts (in fairness, I also did not have a second class I was dying to try in the original game, though the new Runekeeper class from the expansion sounds interesting), it looks like there are easily a few months of quality dungeon-exploring entertainment to be had here. If that's my last word on Moria in a few months, that's certainly not a total failure in my book.

10 comments:

Rend is the upgrade to Cleave. That one threw me for a while too. You can only get the lvl 51+ skills at the class trainers in the 21st hall in Moria, fyi.

I didn't realize the new quest slots were being unlocked by deeds; I'd noticed that my Champ had more quest slots than my other chars but didn't know why until now. Thanks for the heads-up. ;) I must say I rather like that system - the number of quest slots I had before was more than sufficient to get to lvl 50 and beyond, but it's nice to be able to unlock more quest slots. It's a pleasant addition to the deed functionality, where perviously one only got titles and traits. Honestly, I'd like them to add more functionality to deeds, more options for us to use that system to customize our characters.

I still have LOTRO on my HD, but my trial time is over. But I just used my alternate email address to get another trial.

I am actually waiting for Aion, otherwise I would really be tempted to give this game one more try and buy it, as you mentioned you can get it for cheap right now.

I heard "RADIANCE" was a bad idea, basically a way to lock people out of raid content that encourages grinding to get all set parts to have enough radiance to be able to fight some of the endgame bosses. This was heavily criticized by parts of the community.

Still, LOTRO's lore is just tons better than WoW's and Aion actually does not even have one to speak of. And Turbine makes good use of the IP so far.

Unlocking more quest slots only points out that there are some 40/50 quests too much going on at the same time. But well, this game is quest driven, after all...

I rolled a Champion, too, and now will try a Hunter with another trial account (I want to test the fast travel feature, but I resent picking the class as it is heavily overplayed, even more so than Champions). Yeah, I am cheap. I am still unsure about LOTRO.

@Fool: I'm on Vilya, and do not have any complaints about server population (though I'll concede that I don't actually look for groups). Thanks for the clarification about Rend (why on Middle Earth did they change it?), though I'm not looking forward to having to go through several unfamiliar zones of Moria to get to the trainer next level.

Personally, I might not mind the deeds as much if you were actually customizing your characters. Quest slots aren't really customization, they're just bonuses. There might be situational uses for different virtues, but generally you can pick one set of them that will be the best for the majority of situations. It's not really customization if there's only one choice. By contrast, the legendary items certainly are customized, it's just that most of the options are pretty mediocre.

@Long: Yeah, I'm not going anywhere near radiance. The ease of travel for the hunter irritated me too - I did not like the class as much as the Champion, but I ended up not liking the GAME as it was in mid-2007, in part because of the travel times. Teleports and faster runspeed would have helped out in that department.

If you don't like the hunter, you might want to try the new Warden class. From what I've heard, they're kind of like a lower DPS, higher avoidance version of the Champion, and they do get a fair number of teleports to play with.

Hi GA, great post and all of your points make sense to me. I loathe the trait grind / rep grind / Legendary weapon grind / radiance grind time-sinks that Turbine sticks in the game but I loved Moria. I brought my Champion Throg through Moria and like you I found it to be challenging and entertaining. There are also some great instances - I recommend the three man School and Library if you haven't been there.

By the way Rend is a replacement for Cleave that adds area of effect damage over time. I can't remember what level you get it at but it is certainly worth getting because it gives high damage for low fervour.

I bought SoA+MoM from play.com for 15 EUR. (SoA keys alone cost only 3,60 EUR). I did not get the great 9,99$ US offer (it comes down to the same roughly, as I get 2x30 days with the compendium version for 15 EUR), and Codemasters demands more money for downloads than play.com for a boxed version.

I got some ingame extras, but what you also noticed in your blog post really impressed me:

I got +10+30+30 days of gametime: 10 days from the trial, 30 days for SoA and 30 days for Moria.

I played an elven hunter to level 10 and my human champion is level 13 at the moment, he is an explorer and crafted himself some pants and stuff. But I just got to Bree and bought myself some proper armor from the auction house.

I should have stayed on EU-Vanyar, there people offered to craft me stuff for free! ;) But I now play (all alone so far) on EU-Morthond, as some friends might reactivate their accounts there for "Riders of Rohan".

LOTRO is confusing me - I was actually looking forward to Aion, but I cannot shake off the gut feeling that I just feel more at home in a high fantasy setting.

Minor Correction for Foolsage: I got to level 52, and the Champion trainer in Eregion (by the town right outside Moria) was willing to train my level 52 skill upgrade. Maybe it's just the ones in the old towns who get left out?

@Ferrel: Well, it makes sense to change the name when you're adding functionality - I just got the Feral Strikes skill, and apparently it doubles as a dispel (and sets both of my weapons ON FIRE). It's just a bit strange that my level 50 legendary weapon got a boost to a level 54 skill. Or maybe the boost works on the pre-upgraded version too, I don't know of any good way to check.

@Long: Yeah, we have different vendors because you're in the EU and I'm in the US, but that's basically what happened to me; a local retailer wanted their shelfspace back and ended up undercutting Turbine's direct price. It will be interesting to see whether stores even bother to carry Rohan.

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About Player Versus Developer

I'm what they call a "WoW Tourist" - WoW was my first MMO, and being able to set my own schedule is a dealbreaker. At any given time, I can be found ducking in and out of half a dozen different MMO's.

This blog details some of my own personal exploits, but it also focuses on a meta-gaming issue that I find very interesting - the decisions developers make on how to reward player activity, and the decisions players make in response to maximize their own rewards.